


The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Meatball42



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Monsters, Angst, Art, Betrayal, Childhood Trauma, Dean is In Over His Head, Domestic Violence, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, POV Dean Winchester, The Winchesters and The Law
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-22 13:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4837160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is on trial, Dean is the star witness, and Sam has no idea why. He just knows that no matter what he swears to the lawyers or the jury, Dean is not telling the whole truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unlimited thanks to the students in my writing and editing class, who (admittedly for credit) beta’d this fic twice each! Between them, my teacher, and the most gracious [oppisum](http://archiveofourown.org/users/oppisum/pseuds/oppisum) and [sensicalabsurdities](http://sensicalabsurdities.tumblr.com), this story has been beta’d or read through nearly 30 times. #Education. Their brilliant input has brought this from a first draft that I cringe a bit to look back on, to the masterpiece you read before you.
> 
> Story inspired by ‘Hide and Seek’ by Imogen Heap, though it’s gone through a lot of changes since then. I started this a year and a half ago and it's been finished for nearly a year, so my birthday present to myself is getting it the hell out of my files.

 

_I don’t want you_

_But I hate to lose you_

_You got me in between the devil and the deep blue sea_

 

_I forgive you_

_Cos I can’t forget you_

_You got me in between the devil and the deep blue sea_

 

_I want to cross you off my list_

_But when you come knocking at my door_

_Fate seems to give my heart a twist_

_And I come running back for more_

 

_I should hate you_

_But I guess I love you_

_You got me in between the devil and the deep blue sea_

 

_~Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, original lyrics by Ted Koehler_

 

 

March 2005  
  
A crowd of reporters with news cameras seethes just beyond the glass doors of the courthouse. Dean hears them shouting at anyone entering or leaving the building; once in a while he can pick his name out of the clamor. Each time one of the doors opens, their voices echo down the empty hallway and light splinters off the glass to stab at his headache. His tailbone is numb from the old wooden bench outside the judge’s chamber. The suit he’s borrowed fits tightly in all the wrong places.

Dean’s lawyer is inside with the judge, trying to sell the case that Dean isn’t crazy or out for cash or revenge. Saying that he’s a traumatized kid, even though he’s goddamn twenty-seven years old. Dean’s hands jerk into fists, then fall slack: the lawyer’s right.

The glass door opens. The vultures scream, the winter sun jabs him in the eyes, and there are heavy footsteps on the polished courthouse floor. Dean busies himself inspecting the pattern in the marble. His heart rate doesn’t increase, his breathing doesn’t quicken, his stomach doesn’t feel any sicker than it did ten seconds ago. He wishes he could call up a migraine, or a stomach bug, some excuse to go throw up.

Sam stops in front of the bench.

“You didn’t feel the need to call me?”

“And say what?” Dean addresses the floor.

“I don’t know, how about ‘Our dad’s on trial for murder?’”

Some of the tension Dean’s been carrying around for the last two months eases. If Sam’s being sarcastic, he’s not furious. Sam must not know what Dean has done.

Sam’s lecturing at him, talking with his hands, but Dean examines his brother’s road-dusted loafers and the neat hem of his tailored pants. He probably drove straight from his snobby law firm internship in California, the one Dean learned about by bribing Sam’s roommate. But if Dean doesn’t look up, Sam’s still a dork with a stupid bowl-cut he won’t let Dean take a pair of scissors to, still gangly from his senior year growth spurt.

Dean doesn’t look up until Sam says “Jess.”

“You think this won’t affect our relationship? Or my career? People think my dad is a murderer.”

Sam’s hair is darker, curls past his ears, and no longer makes him look like a societal misfit. Of course, the pissy little brother expression hasn’t changed a bit.

Dean holds up his hands: _I got nothin'._ He watches the reporters through the courthouse door, and guesses Sam didn’t listen to their questions when he came in.

Sam sits beside him on the bench and pulls at his shoulder, making Dean face him. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Dean measures Sam’s concerned expression against four years of radio silence. A surge of old, carefully repressed bitterness makes him shake off Sam’s hand. He puts his back to the bench.

“I’m the one who turned Dad in,” Dean says.

 

 

 

August 2000  
  
The first time Dean comes back to Lawrence is a month after Sam leaves for college. Dad is tearing down highways like racetracks and their emergency bottle of Jack gets replaced roughly three times a week. Dean’s in shock, probably, or that’s his excuse for why he feels like crying half the time and screaming at his father the other half. That’s why he convinced his old man to let him go south alone, to check out the job market in Oklahoma, and Dad agreed and split off toward a lead in Tennessee.

Lawrence is a dead spot for the Winchesters, and not just in _that_ way. It’s a black hole that radiates outward, swallowing up the whole state of Kansas from any mention in conversation, erasing any roads they might have travelled where a beady-eyed state trooper with a long memory might pick John Winchester’s face off the old Most Wanted posters. Dean is safe going back by himself-- no one would recognize a four-year-old almost two decades after the fact-- but it’s never been a question of whether he could. No Winchesters in Kansas, that’s Dad’s rule, and Dean follows Dad’s rules.

The first day in town, he drives down the street where his family used to live and nearly crashes into a fire hydrant. Their old house has been rebuilt. Or, no, Dean discovers an hour later at the local library, it wasn’t fully burnt down twenty years ago. The bank fixed it up, the bank whose mortgage John and two young boys had run out on. A new family lives there.

He’d thought it was burned to the ground, no trace remaining of the lives that had occupied the space. But he’d only been four.

Dean goes back at night, urged by something deep inside. Perps go back to the scene of the crime, that’s what the cop shows say, but maybe Dean’s always felt an urge to see this place again, this place that defined him. It might be dark, but it’s not criminal.

The window of Sam’s old nursery doesn’t have curtains, and that’s wrong, he thinks, shivering inside the Impala’s airtight walls. The curtains were closed the night of the fire, looking like they were lit from within by the Devil himself. And then it all burst out. Dean, hands clenched too-tight in Sam’s blankets, had run away, toward the sidewalk, eyes locked over his shoulder on the burning--

No. Dad grabbed him, right? Grabbed him as the explosion happened and pulled him behind a row of cars. He hadn’t hid there, whimpering under the unimaginable noise, for long, long minutes, alone with his screaming baby brother.

No. That’s not right.

The woman who lives in the house now comes up to the open window, talking to someone, starting to fold laundry. Her husband comes up behind her, smiling, placing his hands on her shoulders, and Dean gasps in horror because he’s going to--

No. That’s not right.

 

 

 

March 2005  
  
The water is colder on his face than it was in his hands, and Dean sputters in surprise. He reaches blindly for the paper towels beside the sink and tears off a too-large sheaf, rubs it on his face roughly.

In the mirror, Dean is clean-shaven, hair gelled, pressed into a nicer suit than he’s ever owned. He should be dressed up for a wedding, or a job interview. Not to testify against his father. Not symbolically for the funeral he never got to attend.

Blond hair, darkened now by age. Mom had dark streaks, if he remembers right. He’s got her cheekbones, her lips. Was her forehead rounder, her chin smaller? He spent so many hours as a kid trying to picture her. Until he grew out of that sort of thing, remembering Mom was his birthday-candle wish.

His eyes, though-- Dean has his father’s eyes. He searches them, looking for the darkness he saw in Detroit, when John stopped trying to reason with him and started walking forward--

The restroom door creaks and Dean shoves violently away from the sink, jabs the button on the hand-dryer. The guy entering walks right by him, doesn’t notice his pale face or shaking hands.

Dad taught them to hide.

 

 

 

May 1995  
  
Dad is Dean’s hero. He shouts his sons out of bed when the sun’s just warming the air outside, forces them into shorts and sneakers and makes them keep up as he sprints down to the river, or around the block, wherever the Impala has taken them this time. He teaches them hand-to-hand and knife fighting, how to lie to someone’s face and when to tell the truth. He whips up pancakes on Saturday mornings, corrects Dean’s math over his shoulder, and lets Dean stay up to watch Johnny Carson reruns on low so Sam won’t wake up.

Sometimes, though, he’ll spend days looking around like he can’t see where he is. When he speaks, he’s distracted, and Dean cooks dinner on motel stovetops and keeps Dad in the corner of his eye, watching for the twitches. Leading up to Veteran’s Day or the anniversary of Mom’s death, Dean takes Sam to amusement parks and the library. He tries to hide the constant smell of whiskey on a man who, most days, won’t ration himself more than a beer or two.

When Sam goes to sleep-- after giving Dad a wary hug and Dean a tight one-- Dean pulls out homework and sits with Dad until he’s nearly passed out. He eases off Dad’s leather jacket, unties his boots, guides him to the second bed, where either Dean or Sam has turned down the sheets, and makes him drink at least half a glass of water. Dean refills the cup, leaves it next to an aspirin on the bedside table, and curls up beside Sam.

Dad drinks when he’s sad, and when he starts thinking the guy who works at the post office in Orange County is Viet Cong, and when Sam makes him furious. Sam makes Dad angry pretty much every day, talking back to orders and correcting him about local politics and insisting the Impala needs new seat belts in the back, but as he gets older, more often Sam raises a fuss about staying at one school for a whole year, or how credit card fraud is against the law. Dean tries to shut him up, because Dad’s doing his best, and there’s a lot about the world Sam doesn’t get, and Dad doesn’t need to be worrying about insubordination from the people who’re supposed to have his back. But Sam is one bull-headed kid, and he works Dad up to a seething mess, red-faced and storming around the room screaming at his son, who shouts right back, fearless.

Dean tries to moderate: they’re a family, they need to be on the same page and not get pissed about stupid shit. But one of them always leaves, slamming the motel door hard as they can to spite the other, and he’s left behind to sooth whatever wounds he can.

 

 

  
March 2005  
  
Prosecution questions its own witness first, and the Lawrence ADA is a kind but firm older man who’s done his best to set Dean at ease from the beginning. It doesn’t matter how nice the guy is, though: Dean’s sweating through his over-starched shirt. He’s answered the softball questions already, and he can tell from the prosecutor’s sympathetic expression that it’s time to get to the heavy stuff.

“When did you remember the fire?”

“I never wanted to go back to Kansas. I lived in Lawrence ‘cause I got a good job at an auto shop, but… I didn’t want to see the place my mom died, y’know?”

Screw this. He’s only just started but he’s about to stand up and leave. He hates forcing his feelings to the surface in front of the snapping shutters of the reporters, people who only give a shit about their paychecks and not Dean’s family, but John’s eyebrows are furrowed on the other side of the room and Sam’s long hair gleams behind him. “And then I did go back, and… my memories didn’t match up with reality.”

“In what way?”

The defense attorney sniffs skeptically from his seat across the room, and Dean resists the urge to glare.

“The way I remembered it going down… If I was standing where I thought I’d been standing with Dad, I could have seen straight into the nursery, but for some reason I’d remembered a tree in the way, so I couldn’t see. And I thought there’d been a curtain, but when I used to play in the front yard, Mom was always in the window, watching me. There was never a curtain in that room. And then…” He wipes a hand over his face, sweaty palm just making the sweaty skin feel worse. “I started thinking about that night. Like, why was I just standing at the top of the stairs when the fire started, waiting for Dad to come out and hand me my baby brother? Why didn’t I go see what the light was, why Dad was shouting? And then I remembered… I did go see. I was standing in the doorway when he grabbed her and shook her... her hair had caught on one of the candles she liked, the scented candles, and then her nightgown, and she was screaming, and he threw her on the rocking chair. Dad shouted at me to--”

“Mr. Winchester.” Dean looks up from the dark wood of the witness box to the stern-faced judge, who speaks softly. “Why don’t you take a moment?”

Dean nods. Makes himself sips at the water they’ve left for him. No one’s speaking, but the room is filled with their breaths, with their eyes and expectations: the whole room besides Sam and Jessica wants a gritty tale for the morning edition. He takes a few deep breaths and continues, voice less frantic-- fine, so he’s traumatized. “Dad shouted at me to get out. I ducked behind the doorway-- I always did what Dad said. He was hitting Mom. She was still screaming, and then Dad came out with Sam and gave him to me, and said to get him out, and then he went back inside. And I did what Dad said.”

Dean desperately wants to take his suit jacket off, feels like it would peel off him, but the prosecutor made such a big hullabaloo about his appearance to the jury.

“Outside… I could see the room catching fire. Mom, she didn’t sound hurt, she sounded angry. I saw her in the window, trying to hit him with my teeball bat, the one I always left in Sam’s crib. And he-- took it and bashed her head in. And then he stood there, until the flames got higher, and then he left.”

Dean shakes his head, trying to clear it. He’s gone through this a dozen times with the DA. “I ran for the cars on the sidewalk and hid behind one, shoved Sam underneath. I heard Dad shouting for me a minute later, but I just cried and tried to get under the car myself. By the time the firefighters got there, he’d pulled Sam out from under the car, and… I couldn’t leave Sam. Not without the baseball bat in his crib.”

The room is silent. The ADA steps away, and people start moving, but Dean doesn’t hear them. He looks up when a bailiff touches his elbow gently, and by then the mob has parked itself between him and the door.

Getting through the crowds of reporters is complete hell. The barrage of heat and bodies and cameras and flashes would have been bad enough on any other day, but they’re all _watching_ him. They all just watched him tear his heart out and they want more. His pulse, heavy in his ears and throat, helps block out their questions. He moves toward the exit as fast as he can, tries to ignore the weight of Sam’s eyes on him.

He can feel it a moment later as he walks quickly down the hall toward an office the ADA pointed out to him an hour earlier. He steps inside the room-- a quietly furnished space, a few couches and a small table-- and takes one deep, shuddering breath, and tries to relax his shoulders.

It’s better not to let your muscles be tense, whether the fight is physical or not.

The door slams against the wall.

“What the _hell_ was that?”

“Sam, please, slow down. Think about this--” someone else says.

“Dean. Look at me.” Dean doesn’t. " _Look at me!_ "

“Sam!” Jessica cries again, and Dean forces himself to turn.

His little brother’s face is contorted with anger. His hair flares on the sides, making him look like a vengeful angel on the warpath. Jessica looks frightened, with one hand gentling Sam’s upper arm.

“How could you do this?” Sam’s hands jut into the air on each side of him. “Mom’s death tore Dad apart. What made you hate him so much that you’d lie about it to get him in trouble?”

“It’s not a lie,” Dean says yet again, tired but firm.

Sam doesn’t listen. “And you used me to do it! You told him to visit me and made me a trap! I can’t believe you!” He looks like a bull, heaving breaths in preparation for a charge, Jessica looking on open-mouthed. “For God’s sake, Dean, the prosecutor is asking for the death penalty!”

“Why do you even care?” Dean snaps. “You’re the one who left.”

“He’s our _father_ , Dean!” Sam shouts. “He’s innocent!”

“He’s not.”

Sam rushes him, and Dean could’ve stopped him, but-- it’s Sam. Sam pins him against the wall, and over Sam’s shoulder he can see Jessica rushing to close the door.

“You self-righteous ass,” Sam hisses in his face. “I know when you’re lying. What, you finally get tired of living like gypsies? But instead of moving on, like me, you wanted your fifteen minutes of fame?”

“Get off me!”

“What I don’t get, Dean, is that there are better ways. You could’ve held up a bank-- who knows, maybe you’d even get away with it,” he taunts. “But you had to drag our family through the mud, like there’s not enough shit on us already, and for what? You hate Mom that much?”

“You shut your mouth about Mom!” Dean twists, shoves Sam off, but his little brother has grown up, and he takes a swing that Dean barely dodges in time. Sam forces him against the wall again. “You got no idea what you’re talking about. Every word I said up there is the truth!”

“Liar!” He presses harder and Dean gasps for breath.

“Sam, let him go!” Jessica levers all her weight against Sam’s shoulder and budges him enough that he steps away. “This isn’t going to help. You need to shut up and let him talk. You promised me you would be clear-headed about this.”

“Not likely,” Dean mutters, and Sam’s eyes flare again.

“Don’t you blame me, you traitor.”

“Sam--” Jessica says sharply, but Sam shoves her away, snarling, and then Dean’s slamming him to the opposite wall.

“Don’t you fucking touch her, you son of a bitch, you understand me?”

Sam pushes, but this time Dean is the stronger one, and keeps him down.

“Dean?” Sam’s anger abates for the first time since he came in, or maybe it just looks that way against the fire coursing through Dean’s veins. “Dean, what--”

“You do not push Jessica around, you hear me?” he growls, and Sam blinks several times.

“Dean, what the hell? I’d never hurt her.” Then his eyes narrow, and there’s a certain set to his lips and his jaw, and in the language of brothers raised closer than heads and tails, it means Dean is seeing a demon in every angel.

“Dean, let him go, please,” Jessica is saying behind him.

Dean steps back and his chest is hurting like heartburn, and Jessica is touching his arm now. He lets her, because her eyes are filled with concern and her hands are gentle, and she’s blonde and beautiful, and--

“I gotta go.”

“Dean, wait--” she says, and he wants to, but he doesn’t.

 

 

 

April 2000  
  
Sam’s got a girlfriend. She’s about eight inches shorter than Sam and has soft, rounded edges, but her laugh is big and she cocks her hip like she thinks she’s Britney, and if she weren’t jailbait Dean might be tempted to snatch her away from his little brother. But she is, and he isn’t, and right now he’s most concerned that Sam thinks he’s in love and wants to bring her ‘home’ to meet Dad.

“This isn’t a good idea,” he mutters into Sam’s ear. They’re walking toward the tenement the family’s staying in this month, Daphne holding Sam’s hand and patiently ignoring the conversation Dean is determined not to let her hear: just because he doesn’t want Sam to bring her back to the apartment doesn’t mean he’s trying to break them up, after all.

“You’re the one always telling me to give Dad a chance,” Sam says, turning toward Dean for a half second to shoot him a glare. Dean grinds his teeth together and glances at their building. Closer, now. It’s true, he does say that all the time, since Sam turned fifteen and the arguments between him and Dad started getting vicious, but, “This is different.”

Dean doesn’t know if Dad’s gotten worse, or if he’s just gotten more observant, but over the last few years he’s learned to steer Dad away from pretty blondes. Dad scares them sometimes, standing too close or smiling too long, or saying something vicious out of nowhere. Dean laughs it off, smooths things over-- that’s his job. But deep down, he’s not laughing.

Sam actually sneers at him, the twerp. “Dean,” he says superiorly. “Just because you’ve never brought a girl home doesn’t mean I can’t.”

Daphne is too nice to laugh, but he can see pity on her face when she glances at him, and it’s _nearly_ enough to make him stop pushing, just out of spite. But she looks up at Sam (all the way up at Sam), and says, “If it’s going to cause problems for your family, we don’t have to. It’s okay.”

She smiles, and it’s like the sun is shining on her even though it’s the grayest day in April.

Sam gets this twinge at the corner of his jaw, and even though they’re yards away from their building and Dean’s starting to feel desperate, he knows it’s useless. “No, Daph, it’s fine. I want you to meet my family.”

It’s dark in the living room, but also empty. Dad’s voice echoes in the underfurnished apartment, meaning he’s on the phone in the kitchen. Sam and Daphne sit next to each other on the sofa, holding hands and talking quietly. From the doorway, Dean watches them and wishes this could last. He knows it won’t.

Dad comes in from the kitchen. He stops when he sees their guest and says, “Sam, are you going to introduce us?”

Sam smiles at his girl, then at Dad, and they both stand. Dean watches Sam introduce them, watches Daphne and Dad shake hands, listens as Dad congratulates Sam for meeting such a nice young lady. Sam takes a deep breath and admits they’re dating, have been for ‘a few weeks,’ and Dad smiles wider, and says he guessed, and tells Daphne that Sam’s looked a lot happier in the last month, and she giggles and glows up at Sam, who glows right back, and it’s all so perfect that Dean wants to barf.

Sam and Daphne sit down on the couch and Dad takes the armchair, and Dean stands in the doorway while they talk about how Sam and Daphne met at Debate Club, and how she wants to be a social worker, and how prom is coming up soon, and all the while Dad is smiling that perfectly normal smile, but his eyes are dark and his voice is syrupy and charming in a way that it shouldn’t be, and Dean knows his dad.

Dean knows his dad and this is the beginning of the end.

Three days later Dean seduces Daphne. A week later Sam finds out and three months later he leaves for Stanford, and Dean doesn’t know why, not precisely, but of the many things he regrets about his relationship with Sam, this _never_ becomes one of them.

 

 

 

March 2005  
  
“Why now?”

It’s all anyone asks, once they know the basics. Reporters, lawyers, even Dean’s grandparents, for the horrifying few hours they dragged themselves to Kansas. What made you wait? Why didn’t you remember before? How could you live in Lawrence for four years and never think about it? They all want to pick him apart and criticize, and goddammit he’s had enough of that in his life.

“It’s been four years since you’ve seen your father, Dean. Twenty-three years since the housefire where you claim to have seen John Winchester, a decorated Marine, murder his wife after nearly a decade of marriage. Why is the court only now hearing this story?”

The defense lawyer is fox-eyed, shifty: the kind of man Dad always taught them to look out for. There’s a permanent smirk on his lips when he looks at Dean, a half-smirk, on the side the jury can’t see. Behind him is John’s dark gaze, the first thing Dean learned to read. Still behind him on John’s side of the courtroom is Sam, squinting again in suspicion.  
  
_"You turn your back on your family, Sam, that's it." Dad's finger shakes, inches from his son's face. "You never come back."_  
  
_"Why would I ever want to?"_  
  
“Mr. Winchester.” Dean blinks. “Why did you accuse your father of murder twenty-three years after your mother’s death?”

“I didn’t accuse him, first of all. He was already wanted. I just told them where to find him.”

“And you volunteered to be the star witness for the prosecution. What I want to know is why.”

Sam looks like an angry cat waiting to pounce. Beside him, Jessica’s expression is more neutral, but she’s a smart girl. She doesn’t believe him either.

He’d wondered, when they told him to put a hand on the Bible and swear to God, what they did with Muslims or Jews, because they clearly don’t give a crap about atheists.

“I didn’t remember until now.”

The lawyer walks away, addressing the question to the jury. “Dean, you travelled with your father since you were a child, and joined him in looking for work on the road once you turned eighteen. What made you decide to leave him four years ago?”

Dean gulps, plays up the sad eyes for the jury, but subtly. He doesn’t have to fake the emotions much at this point; he takes advantage of what’s already there. The way Dad taught them. “I didn’t want to leave Dad. But my brother had just gone off to college, and… it just didn’t feel right. We were always a real tight family, and… I guess I just needed space.”

The lawyer scoffs, just enough for the jury to hear. “For four years?”

Dean shakes his head. “I got a job, a permanent one. Started making a life in one place. I didn’t want to give it up.”

“And yet you changed your mind five months ago, when you went to the police.”

Dean glares. “My mother’s life is worth more than my job.”

“Your mother’s life is not at stake,” the lawyer retorts. “The only person gaining anything from this miscarriage of justice is you, Dean! Your brother was moving on without you so you decided to get his attention--”

“What the hell--”

“Objection! Where was the question in that?”

“Objection sustained,” the judge says, gavel nearly lost in the murmurs of the courtroom’s peanut gallery. Dean’s face is burning and the douchebag is standing between him and Sam.

“There is no _reason_ for you to accuse your father of this crime, Mr. Winchester!” The lawyer’s getting in his face now. “What made you speak up?”

He can’t. But that old lady on the jury is starting to frown, and the prosecutor’s tapping his pen in the nervous tell Dean spotted weeks ago, and the lawyer’s eyes are gleaming like he’s got a mouse cornered.

“Jessica.”

The defence lawyer looks uncertain for the first time in the entire court process, and Dean would smirk at him if he didn’t feel like his gut had turned to cement. Nobody else makes a sound, probably because they have no idea what Dean’s talking about.

“What?” Sam whispers, behind John on the other side of the room, but Dean hears it anyway.

 

 

 

October 2004  
  
He’s been sitting in this tired old diner for too many cups of gritty coffee. Dean lets his cold mug clunk to the table so he can massage his temples. It’s been nearly four years since he settled down in Kansas, and Detroit is a lot colder than he remembered. He’d nearly balked at Dad’s location for their meet, but Dad said he’s got a good set-up going, and what was this about, anyway?

It’s not about anything. It’s just been a while, right?

Uncle Bobby mentioned, in that knowing way of his, that Dean’s father has been heading out to California an unusual amount the last few months. Bobby always knows when something’s up, and it seems like he’s known something for Dean’s entire life, so he’s inclined to listen when the old man gives him a tip.

The waitress slumped behind the counter gives another sigh. The pavement outside is pale gray with age, making it tough to see the thin layer of frost that’s been creeping along any still edges for the past few hours. Dad’s truck is nearly frosted over, like some neighborhood kid got busy with fake snow. Clearly, it hasn’t moved in a while.

It’s depressing, abruptly enough to give him whiplash, and he gets up to leave. Anger, forced down for years, smolders quietly: he’s wasted enough time waiting on Dad.

He plans to jimmy open the truck and leave a note in there, but it’ll be easier in Dad’s room, and it’s not like they haven’t lived in each other’s pockets for most of his life. He picks the lock on the motel room, shoves at the frozen door til it gives, and stops dead in the entryway.

Every few years, driving from motel to motel, Dad would send Sam and Dean out to run, or to the library or somewhere, while Dad sunk push-pins into the walls of their room and hung maps and newspaper clippings, circled things in a frenzy and wrote in his leather-bound journal. He’d tell them it was about finding the guy who killed Mom. Sam had been caught reading the journal once, and got such a thrashing that neither boy had gone near it again.

The pictures on the walls here are not long-distance shots of Lawrence or maps of middle America, or itineraries of Mom’s last few days. They’re pictures of Mom, alright, but destroyed: arrows heavily inscribed in sharpie, or partly torn, or written on in black pen so that her features are obscured. And next to each one, treated the same way, are pictures of a woman Dean has only seen from afar, on his occasional stalker visits to Stanford.

Sam’s girlfriend.

Detroit’s icy wind scratches the back of his neck, and he closes the door. He inches closer to the walls.

Lined paper, with his Dad’s handwriting. He’s almost afraid to read it, but he does. It’s sick, it’s crazy shit, and Dean doesn’t read too much before he feels violently nauseous. The pictures make it worse. Dark lines drawn over their bodies, pen dug so deeply into the paper it made holes. Dean’s shaking. He strides to the front door to get out of there, and is confronted by another set of two images, taped on the back of the door.

The back of Sam’s head, and his girlfriend laughing. Next to it, Mom laughing, aged by yellow paper, in the backyard of her parent’s house in Lawrence.

Aside from clothing two decades removed, they look almost exactly the same.

He’s throwing up on the pavement outside, hanging onto Dad’s truck, when he hears footsteps behind him on the concrete, and he knows whose they are. He comes up swinging.

But everything he knows he learned from his father, and Dean’s fist is deflected, held aside. “You--” he chokes out, but the bile in his mouth, the sight of his father’s face, makes him gag.

Dad grabs his shoulders to steady him and Dean tries to shove him away. “Son, it’s not what you think.”

“Not what I think? I don’t think anything, I know! I know you killed Mom.”

Dad shakes his head, lips pulled together impatiently. “No, Dean, I didn’t. Those things inside, that’s research. I’m looking for--”

“I remembered!” Dean shouts, body quaking like he has a high fever. “I remember you fighting with her, the night the house burned down. You killed her. And now you’re going after Sam’s girl? Dad!” He steps forward, reaches out like he hasn’t been pushing Dad away.

Dad’s jaw sets and his eyes go dark, and Dean trips backward instinctively.

Dad stares him down a moment longer, walks to his truck, opens the driver’s door. He pulls the keys out of his pocket, and Dean remembers abruptly, four years distant, the deer-hunting rifles Dad keeps in the backseat. “Where are you going?”

His dad looks back at him and sneers. “California.”

Before he can think, Dean’s hands are around his father’s throat, slamming him against the black, frosted metal. John fights back with his elbows and knees and hips, and in less than ten seconds, Dean’s back is against the truck, hand pinched between two iron-strong fingers. It’s a pressure point, and a high-pitched gasp comes out reflexively.

Maybe it’s because he’s been thinking about it so much in the last few weeks, but that sound brings him back to heat and the cracking of wood and honey blonde hair perversely entwined with orange flames, and he lashes out harder than he thought he could.

John’s nose cracks. His grip loosens enough that Dean can tear away, run to the Impala. When the motel is miles behind him, adrenaline still freezing his hands, all Dean can see is blood pouring from his father’s nose, that straight nose that Dean and Sam share, and his eyes, dark like smoke, watching Dean run away. That same expression he can remember, more clearly than ever before, from the night John dragged him and Sam from beneath a car and held them tight and watched their house burn.

John doesn’t know where Dean’s been living, these last few years, or at least he hopes not. Bobby said he doesn’t, but John’s always been a sneaky bastard. Just in case, he puts the pedal to the metal and spends the night in Jefferson City, sleepless on a motel bed with the kitchen light on, constantly double-taking at blank walls. In the morning, he drives back to Lawrence, to his apartment. It’s empty, safe. Probably.

But Sam isn’t. He just took his LSATs, according to Dean’s informant in Palo Alto. He’s settled in there with his fancy college and his girlfriend. He’s got no idea that he should be locking his doors. Or getting fire insurance.

When Dean was doing research on his family’s house, he’d read the police statement from the guy who was in charge of his mom’s case. He looks up the article again, and then the Lawrence Police switchboard.

 

 

 

March 2005  
  
Dean slumps on one of the armchairs in the quiet office for a good ten minutes, this time, before the door opens with a measured click. Sam and Jessica sit on the couch beside him, his arm tight around her shoulders, one of her hands settling on his wrist. She reaches out to take Dean’s hand. “Thank you, Dean.”

He shakes his head. “What was I supposed to do? Let him…”

She squeezes his hand, then sits back.

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” Sam asks tersely.

“He didn’t do anything to you guys. He’ll go away a long time for killing Mom.”

“He was going to hurt Jess. You don’t think that warrants a mention?”

Sam was never satisfied with the way they lived when they were kids. He was always just waiting to get out. He hated the food. He hated Dad’s jobs, the places they lived, the fact that he could never go to the same school for very long, and he didn’t like Dad very much either. Sometime around his twentieth birthday, Dean got the feeling that Sam didn’t like him very much, and it’s never really gone away.

“He didn’t do anything. The police stopped him before he got near you. Why would I want you to know how crazy he really is? Why should she have to hear about it?”

Sam’s glaring defiantly, like he still thinks Dean should have made a different choice, some better choice that would miraculously appear from the air. Dean should be resentful, and he’s considered it a thousand times, that he’s done everything for Sam and in return he gets a little brother who looks down on him. He should be angry, but-- it’s Sam.

The tension breaks when the door opens again. It’s the ADA. His gaze crawls over the three of them before he sits down, examining Dean. “You nearly got us in a whole lotta trouble, son.”

“Retrial?” Sam asks, suddenly sounding exhausted.

“Nearly. We have the evidence from Detroit to back up your claims, Dean, but they weren’t logged into evidence because we weren’t planning to push this way. Your father’s lawyer would’ve been well within his rights to call for a retrial.”

“But he’s not?” Jessica says hopefully.

“They’ve accepted a plea deal.”

Sam and Jessica slump back against the sofa as one. The prosecutor looks tired, but satisfied. Dean can’t feel much of anything. They’ve won, but Mom’s still gone. The man who killed her will never be Dad again. Sam has his forehead pressed against Jessica’s, and hasn’t looked at him since the prosecutor came in.

“So it’s over?” Jessica murmurs. Dean looks away.

“Yeah, babe, it’s over.”

 

 

 

September 1991  
  
It’s nearly ninety degrees out, but Dean doesn’t care. He’s jumping up from his seat every time the crack of the bat echoes through the stadium, waiting for the ball to rocket up to their seats. They don’t have a home team, but Dean’s rooting for the Rangers because, come on, Chuck Norris. He takes a huge bite of his hot dog and nearly chokes on it when his adopted team makes a smooth double play.

“Did you see that?” he shouts, muffled, to his family.

Dad’s nose is burning badly and he’s sweating straight through his shirt, but he manages an amused smile for Dean. “Yeah, son, we saw it.”

Sam is sitting sideway, sneakers sliding on the hot stadium seats, licking the last of his ice cream off his fingers. “It’s boring,” he grumbles.

“No way, baseball is the best,” Dean insists. He sits down and drags Sam around so he’s looking at the field. Sam pushes against his arm, but Dean squeezes him until he gives up, still whining.

“Let the boy breathe, Dean,” Dad chuckles. Dean loosens his grip and gives Sam a noogie instead.

By the end of the inning, Sam’s asleep on his shoulder, long hair tickling Dean’s face. He pulls Sam closer over the armrest and lays his head on top of his little brother’s, letting the sounds of the game drift away.

 

 

 


	2. Art by talullahred

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back when I started writing this fic, it was supposed to be for a) journeystory, a now-defunct lj that produced some kickass stories and b) a writing class. I finished the fic well enough to pull a B+, but wasn't nearly satisfied enough to publish (aka I skipped the last round of edits, which weren't required for the grade). And, since the '14-'15 school year was a time of intense shit, I didn't do those edits for a long time. And, re: intense shit: as I blocked off a good chunk of that time and/or was too tired to even think about it, I completely forgot that my artist was not suffering an inability to finish shit and came through in a massive way. Zoom forward to now, when I find her work on my phone when my pics mass-download from the cloud (?) and I realize that woah, she really ought to get credit for the work she did while I was busy crying into my pillow instead of producing kick-ass art.
> 
> tl;dr Talullahred is a stand-up, competent artist who complied with my whiny and my sole contribution of 'lots of yellow,' and made the gorgeously manip-ed banner you see before you, which tbh is probably deeper than my actual fic. Talullah, thank you so much for putting up with my shit and making something beautiful.

  
  
  
  
  



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